(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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WILLI BOLLE
to assemble all (or almost all) the fragments about colonialism, so as to
capture Benjamin’s view on this subject. The leitmotif of this constellation
could be an unpublished résumé of fragment J54a,7 made by Benjamin:
“Blick [der Metropole] auf das koloniale Imperium” (“View of the
colonial empire [from the metropolis]”); 11 it will be completed by fragments
which also show the reverse view, looking at the metropolis from
the colonial empire. This assemblage of passages (in section II) will be the
core of this essay.
Benjamin’s choice of fragments about the relations between the
European metropolis and its periphery is a kind of last instantaneous
snapshot of colonialism at the threshold of postcolonial times. While
concepts such as “Kolonial poesie” and “Kolonialpolitik” (“colonial
poetry,” 12 and “colonial politics” 13 ) already express a critical position
toward “colonial imperialism,” his use of the everyday-word “Kolonialwaren”
(“products from the colonies,” A6a,1), very common in
Germany in the 1930s, reveals him to be still embedded in the generalized
colonialist mentality. The ambiguity of this threshold position
makes Benjamin’s work particularly interesting for postcolonial writers
and scholars. Learning from his study of the Second Empire from the
perspective of the period between the First and Second World Wars,
we have to consider the difference between Benjamin’s epoch and
our own era of globalization. Under the sign of the “now of recognizability”
it is important to read his work in light of the historical
transformations that have occurred since the composition of the Passagen-Werk:
from the movements of decolonization, such as the Algerian
War, to the migration of “dark masses” from the periphery of the
world to the most advanced centers such as, for instance, Paris, the
“city of light,” in whose suburbs conflicts of ethnic violence between
economically disenfranchised youths and the government exploded in
September 2005.
As to the conception and method of postcolonial studies adopted in
this essay, I would like to make it clear in advance that I do not intend
to apply a determined theoretical frame to Benjamin’s and other writers’
work. Rather, my text has been written in the opposite direction: from the
inside of concrete literary facticity toward the elucidation of some specific
problems. Perhaps this is a way of experimenting with Benjamin’s formula:
“Konstruktion aus Fakten. Konstruktion unter vollständiger Eliminierung
der Theorie” (“Construction out of facts. Construction with the
complete elimination of theory”; O,73). Applying Benjamin’s dictum
to the intersection of German and Brazilian studies, I intend to extract
theoretical potential from literary texts themselves. In fact, who could be
a more legitimate voice of postcolonialism if not the writers of countries
with a colonial past?